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'Absurd Yet Predictable': US Close to Losing Measles Elimination Status Under RFK Jr.
"The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists," said one physician.
Nov 21, 2025
US public health officials warned this week that the country is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to the vaccine-averse policies and practices of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials have linked the ongoing measles outbreak in Arizona and Utah with the major outbreak in Texas that began in January, both of which are being caused by the same viral subtype. With no signs of slowing, and holiday travel and gatherings fast approaching, experts worry that measles transmission could escalate and the disease will no longer be considered eliminated.
Under World Health Organization guidance, "eliminated" means an absence of endemic virus transmission for 12 months or longer in a defined geographical area under a well-performing surveillance system.
Many public health experts blame the administration of President Donald Trump—and particularly Kennedy's policies—for the measles resurgence. Kennedy, who initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak, has endorsed vaccines, but has also made unsupported or misleading claims about the safety and efficacy of measles shots.
"Absurd yet predictable," Dr. Michael O'Brien, an urgent care pediatrician, wrote Thursday on X. "The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists. As measles approaches endemic status in the US for the first time since 2000, the CDC has abandoned science and reason."
The anti-vaccination movement is largely to blame for the continuing measles outbreak and the fact that the U.S. is going to lose our measles elimination status. Until RFK Jr. is removed from office, things are only going to get worse. @jimalwine.bsky.social and I wrote about here:
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— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 2:18 PM
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. However, with 1,753 confirmed cases and three deaths in 45 reported outbreaks so far this year, experts say the US is at risk of following Canada, which announced earlier this month that it has lost its elimination status, which it enjoyed since 1998.
As in the US, experts attribute Canada's measles backsliding to declining vaccination rates, mis- and disinformation, and vaccine aversion—especially among religious groups. The West Texas outbreak began in the close-knit, unvaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County, while the Arizona/Utah outbreak originated among members of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot.
More than 9 in 10 reported US measles cases this year are among people who have either not been vaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Writing for LiveScience, University of Pennsylvania molecular virologist James Alwine and University of Arizona professor emerita and epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs warned Wednesday that measles is "a bellwether of declining vaccination rates—a wailing siren that other vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are just around the corner."
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic," Alwine and Jacobs asserted. "The movement is responsible for undermining trust in scientists and vaccines via a tsunami of misinformation coming from social media accounts and podcast appearances."
The authors continued:
This was made worse when Senate Republicans confirmed Kennedy as secretary of HHS, despite the objections of tens of thousands of scientists, healthcare providers, and public health practitioners. Kennedy is an avowed anti-vaccination proponent who chaired Children's Health Defense, an organization that regularly promotes vaccine misinformation. He is also a conspiracy theorist and has claimed that Covid-19 is a "bioweapon" engineered to "attack Caucasians and Black people" while sparing Ashkenazi Jews; that WiFi causes brain cancer; and that drug use, not HIV, causes AIDS. His appointment opened the door to install anti-vaccine proponents as leaders in public health, such as replacing the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with several individuals with links to the anti-vaccine movement. In confirming Kennedy, Senate Republicans utterly failed the people of the US and demonstrated a cavalier disregard for decades of scientific achievement.
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an investigation into Kennedy's ACIP purge. The following month, six major US medical organizations sued Kennedy, alleging his vaccine policies are placing children at grave and immediate risk.
"As the anti-vaccine movement continues to be nurtured by Kennedy and his followers, this threat will only continue to expand and grow more severe," Alwine and Jacobs warned. "Removing state vaccine requirements for school entry—as has happened in Florida—is demonstrative of this, and represents an unacceptable risk."
"Kennedy must be removed from office," they added, echoing a September demand by more than 1,000 current and former HHS officials. "There can be no improvements in public health or vaccination rates as long as he continues his destructive reign."
In September, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy, declaring that he "has violated his oath of office and proven himself unfit to serve the American people."
Advocacy groups and medical organizations have gathered more than 150,000 petition signatures calling for Kennedy's removal.
On Friday, Congresswoman Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), who chairs the Democratic Doctors Caucus, led 65 colleagues demanding that Kennedy "immediately correct" the CDC website "after it was updated to promote the widely disproven and dangerous claim that vaccines may cause autism."
"RFK Jr.’s decision to spread fringe conspiracy theories and misinformation on the CDC’s official website is reckless," Schrier said in a statement. "He’s scaring parents, undermining trust in the CDC, and putting children at risk.”
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'It Will Kill People': HHS Proposal Targeting Transgender Healthcare Could Cause Even More Hospitals to Close
One advocate said the proposed rule would force hospitals "to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid."
Oct 30, 2025
A pair of extreme new Trump administration rules aimed at functionally banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth could force even more hospitals to close down.
NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) drafted a proposed rule that would prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than 18 and prohibit the same from the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for patients under 19.
Another proposed rule goes even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, this "would effectively eliminate access to such care nationwide, except at the few private clinics able to forgo Medicaid entirely, a rarity in transgender youth medicine."
The policies are of a piece with the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party's efforts to eliminate transgender healthcare for youth across the country.
Bans on gender-affirming care for those under 18 have already been passed in 27 states, despite evidence that early access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormones can save lives.
As Reed pointed out, a Cornell University review of more than 51 studies shows that access to such care dramatically reduces the risk of suicide and the rates of anxiety and depression among transgender adolescents.
The new HHS rules are being prepared for public release in November and would not be finalized for several more months.
But if passed, the ramifications could extend far beyond transgender people, impacting the entire healthcare system, for which federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is a load-bearing piece. According to a report last year from the American Hospital Association, 96% of hospitals in the US have more than half their inpatient days paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.
It is already becoming apparent what happens when even some of that funding is taken away. As a result of the massive GOP budget law passed in July, an estimated $1 trillion is expected to be cut from Medicaid over the next decade. According to an analysis released Thursday by Protect Our Care, which maintains a Hospital Crisis Watch database, more than 500 healthcare providers across the country are already at risk of shutting down due to the budget cuts.
Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization, said that the newly proposed HHS rule would be "forcing hospitals to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid."
"Today’s news marks a dangerous overreach by the executive branch, pitting trans people, low-income families, disabled people, and seniors against each other and making hospitals choose which vulnerable populations to serve," Hack said. "If these rules become law, it will kill people."
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Former Surgeons General Say It's Their Duty to Warn of 'Profound' Threat RFK Jr. Poses to Americans
"Science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation," the former surgeons general warned.
Oct 07, 2025
Six former US surgeons general, who have worked across multiple presidential administrations, said Tuesday that they have a duty to warn Americans that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a danger to the health of the public.
In a joint editorial published by The Washington Post, the former surgeons general, including President Donald Trump's first-term surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said that Kennedy's actions are "endangering the health of the nation" and that his policies represent a "profound, immediate, and unprecedented threat" to public health.
The surgeons general went on to say that they have been watching "with increasing alarm as the foundations of our nation's public health system have been undermined" and "science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation."
They then singled out Kennedy's decades-long obsession with promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which they said risks bringing back diseases that have long been eradicated in the United States.
"This year, as the United States faced its worst measles outbreak in more than 30 years, Kennedy de-emphasized vaccination and directed agency resources toward unproven vitamin therapies," they wrote. "The result: months-long outbreak, three preventable deaths, and the first measles-related child death in the US in over two decades."
The surgeons general also pointed to Kennedy's decision to link products containing acetaminophen to autism, despite no clear evidence to justify such a claim.
"This move has been widely condemned by the scientific and medical communities, who have pointed out that the available research is inconclusive and insufficient to justify such a warning," they wrote. "In an extraordinary and unprecedented response, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other leading health organizations issued public guidance urging physicians and patients to disregard HHS’s recommendation."
Elsewhere in the editorial, the surgeons general accused Kennedy of leading a campaign to silence and sideline career public health researchers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which they said had created "an atmosphere of fear and distrust" in public health agencies, in which "scientific findings are censored, evidence is disregarded, and career officials are pressured to rubber-stamp conclusions that are not backed by science."
The surgeons general aren't the only public health experts warning about the negative impact of Kennedy's tenure. NPR reported on Monday that two professional psychiatric associations, the Southern California Psychiatry Society and the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health, have now called for Kennedy's removal as HHS secretary.
In a statement released late last month, the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health charged that Kennedy "has undermined the public health infrastructure" by retaliating against scientists who have opposed his directives, while at the same time promoting "fringe ideas" that have "contributed to public confusion."
The committee ended its statement by calling on Trump to remove Kennedy from his post and "appoint a qualified, evidence-driven leader without delay."
Similarly, the Southern California Psychiatric Association has released a statement calling for Kennedy's ouster so that he can be replaced with a "qualified health leader with the training, experience, and integrity required to safeguard the health and well-being of all Americans."
Dr. Emily Wood, co-chair of the Southern California Psychiatric Association, told NPR that she was particularly disturbed by the recently released Make America Health Again (MAHA) report that she said "specifically misrepresents the data on psychotropic medications, really ignoring the full body of the scientific literature."
She said that this misrepresentation of data was used by the report to call "for various ways to limit access to psychiatric medications, which is extremely disturbing as these are medications that are critical for many individuals with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, ADHD, and many disorders."
Last month, more than 1,000 current and former HHS employees released a letter calling for Kennedy's removal, as they accused him of trying to "endanger the nation’s health" by "sowing public mistrust" of vaccines.
The surgeons general on Tuesday also suggested that Kennedy should no longer serve as the country's top health official, saying that "the nation deserves a health and human services secretary who is committed to scientific integrity and can restore morale and trust in our public health agencies."
"Having served at senior levels in government, we know that politics are complicated," they said. "But this is bigger than politics. It’s about putting the health of Americans first."
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